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OpenNebula 3.2 adds out-of-the-box VMware support

NGC6537 - The Red Spider Nebula
Source: NASA/STScI/ESA
The developers of OpenNebula, the "open source cloud computing toolkit", have announced version 3.2 of the software which adds support for Xen and KVM and out-of-the-box support for VMware including live migration, image and network management and automatic contextualisation (setting of parameters based on the host and other rules).

The release also sees a number of C12G add-ons integrated into the Apache 2.0 licensed OpenNebula toolkit that were previously only available in C12G's commercially supported OpenNebulaPro distribution of the platform. OpenNebula releases are named after nebulas and version 3.2 goes by the name "Red Spider" after the Red Spider Nebula.

Among the new version's other enhancements is a web-based self-service portal for environments where users are allowed to provision compute, storage and network resources themselves, or simply to make administration easier. User and group management now allows for easier sharing of virtual resources, and security improvements, beyond fixing known issues, include updated authentication drivers which perform better. Other changes include new drivers for performing network setup for virtual machines and support for "Data Center Placement Policies" such as packing (ensure least nodes in use), striping (spread VMs over clusters) and load-aware (use least used nodes). Full details of all the changes are in the release notes.

OpenNebula 3.2 is used by organisations such as the European Space Agency, KPMG, Fermilab, Logica, China Mobile and CERN. The OpenNebula Ecosystem Catalog lists other tools, plugins and extensions available for the platform. The new 3.2 release can be downloaded (registration optional) from the project's site and is available as source or binary packages for CentOS 6.0, Ubuntu 10.04, openSUSE 11.4 and Debian 6.0.2.